People like to take and share photos. There is increased interest in taking photos from mobile devices, and then sharing photos using a mobile device, whether using a mobile application, or by accessing a remote Internet service using a mobile device.
There is interest in more, and more engaging, content especially to meet the demands of consumers for content that is easy to create and to share through their social networks. Social media creates significant demand for content that can be created and shared regularly through social networks, and that is interesting to recipients. The pursuit of a significant social media footprint by a large number of consumers through social networks, and associated business models that target these consumers through social networks, means that digital media platforms that allow consumers to create and share this content easily and efficiently, can be very valuable.
Video content in particular is very popular, and this has resulted in the growing interest in interactive content. Creation and consumption of content from a mobile device is advantageous to users who are on the go, and for many activities users do not want to be tethered to a desktop computer. In fact increasingly computer users are mobile computing users. As a result there is growing interest in technologies that enable the creation of content using smart phones and tablet computers for example.
A fairly new form of visual content has emerged recently, namely selectively animated photographs sometimes referred to as “cinemagraphs”, “cinegraphs” or “living photographs”. These consist of still photographs in which a selected area is animated or moves. This animation or movement may occur once, or may be repeated. These selectively animated photographs are referred to as “cinemagraphs” in this disclosure.
Cinemagraphs generally convey to the viewer the impression that s/he is consuming video. Moreover, design choices as to what portions of an image are animated and which are not can result in very interesting and beautiful compositions, for which there is increasing demand.
A number of methods for creating cinemagraphs are known in the art. These generally involve taking a series of photographs or a video recording, and using an image editing computer program to create a seamless loop of sequential image frames, and then using an animated GIF file format for example, to create the animated portions of the living images.
There is growing interest in cinemagraphs, however, generally speaking publicly available methods are relatively complicated, and quite time consuming. There is a need for a more streamlined, simpler, and/or shorter method for creating cinemagraphs.
Also, conventional methods for creating cinemagraphs generally require the use of computer programs such as PHOTOSHOP™ that typically cannot run on mobile devices, and even on tablet computers operation of such computer programs as PHOTOSHOP™ may not operate optimally.
There is a need therefore for a method that enables the creation of cinemagraphs efficiently, and that provides an intuitive workflow that allows consumers to creating beautiful cinemagraphs using a computer device, including a smart phone or a tablet computer. There is a further need for a computer system and a computer program, operable on a mobile device, that enables the creation of cinemagraphs.